Best Film of the Month - No Country for Old Men
Worst Film of the Month - Love in the City
*Fellini's episode of Boccaccio 70 would get a 10/10 but unfortunately the other three episodes don't measure up.
I also didn't rate The River and Death because my version had no subtitles and I feel it's inadequate to judge the film.

Luckily December is already looking good. I've seen 12 films in the first four days as opposed to 31 for the month of November.

Best Film of the Month - Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Worst Film of the Month - Dracula Prisoner of Frankenstein

Count 'em up if you would, but I watched a lot of movies. Many of the films were shorts (and there's even a few I never wrote down). It was hard to rate some of the experimental films I saw, particularly some of the Godard films, hence why I didn't rate a few of his short films. Although Holy Grail was the film of the month, the best film I saw for the first time would be Ingmar Bergman's Devil's Wanton.

A new year is upon us and the first month has come and gone. A little and a lot has changed in my life, but carrying on from my impressive movie watching in December, this first month proved to be very productive for cinema.

Easy Rider really clicked this time (I attempted a review in the classic cinema section) but part of it is that I admired the way the film was structured. I also listened to Dennis Hopper's commentary which made me not hear most of the intolerable hippy nonsense dialogue that angered me the last time.

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is another example of my taste in Lubitsch being remarkably different from most. This film was sold primarily on the strength of its two leads and although it seemed completely familiar it worked on that ultra-fine assembly line production mode that makes you feel like there was a time in American cinema where masterpieces were just cranked out like model-T Fords.

Before Night Falls seemed to go on for too long and never really captivated me. There were things I liked but all too often I found myself predicting the next move and being let down when it happened. Perhaps I just don't like poets and I'm sick of movies about revolutions turning into witch hunts afterwards, even if it usually does happen.

Well, I adore poets, and I found this one to be one of the best directed modern American films I have seen. The film itself often felt like a poem. I'm also a fan of Schnabel's Basquiat (1995). Btw, I think the hippie dialogue is just part of the film in Easy Rider, and not some personal revelation on the part of the director or the actors. As far as I know, most of it was also improvised on spot.